We are driving through the Napa Valley in a 2013 Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse (that’s French for speed), and we are in a world that is beyond mere excess (more so the car than the countryside.) We are traveling in an exclusive zone that was deliberately created for this car and for its 450 owners. Suffice to say that perhaps the two most exclusive numbers this car carries, kind of like wearing your Oscar statue on your sleeve, are its top speed, 254 miles an hour, and its price, $2.5 million. No other regular production car gets close.

It would be tempting to simply say that this is just another car – four wheels, a motor and a steering wheel. By that criterion, you could say that Cézanne’s “The Card Players,” which sold two years ago for $267 million, is just another painting of two guys at a card table. No, this car is special and its provenance says a lot about why it’s special and why Volkswagen, which bought the Bugatti name in 1998, decided to make this car. After all, they were (and still are) selling plenty of Volkswagens, Audis, Porsches and even such top-line cars as Bentley and Lamborghini. Why make this car at all? Because they can.

The chairman speaks

In fact, the car probably would never have happened if not for Ferdinand Piëch, the then- chairman and CEO of Volkswagen Group. Piëch is the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche – yes, that Porsche – and when he took over Volkswagen in 1993 he had already cut his gear teeth at Porsche, where he developed race cars, and at Audi, where he came up with the Audi 80 and 100. When he arrived at Volkswagen AG, the umbrella company, VW was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and Piëch managed to not only turn it around but to make it a highly successful auto maker. And, with his later purchase of Lamborghini and Bentley, he showed he had not lost his love of fast cars. After buying Bugatti in 1998, Piëch pondered what to do with the historic brand – a legendary marque revered for its performance cars that were also quite beautiful or, put another way, beautiful cars that also performed. That’s what Piëch had in mind when he met with his engineering team and outlined his vision for a modern Bugatti.

There were only three criteria, he told them: it must have more than 1,000 horsepower; it has to go from zero to 62 miles an hour (100 kilometers per hour) in less than three seconds; and it has to go faster than 252 miles an hour (406 kph.) Hey, boss, no problem. Oh, and there’s one other thing, Piëch said as he headed for the door of the meeting room. I do not want this car to embarrass me when I show up for the opening of the opera. That was it.

The resulting Veyron (named for Pierre Veyron, who had been a Bugatti engineer and racing driver in the 1930s) was introduced as a concept car in 2000. Its eight-liter, 16-cylinder engine had 1,001 horsepower, did zero to 62 in about two and a half seconds and went one kilometer an hour faster than the Piëch-mandated 406 kph. In 2005, the new closed coupe went on sale. For about 15 seconds. Word of this mysterious super-car had already gotten out and the batch of 300 cars was quickly snapped up. In the summer of 2008, a version with a removable targa top was released and was dubbed “Grand Sport.” Two years later, with 1,001 horses apparently not being enough, Bugatti brought out the Super Sport, with 1,200 ponies available for those midnight dragging-for-pink-slip runs. Speaking of which….. we didn’t exactly tear up the Napa Valley roads the other day, but we did get out there and drive around for more than an hour and we did get a taste of what it would be like to live with this beast. Actually, it was far from a beast.

No power seats. No cup holders.

“What makes this car unique is that normally cars like this begin life as a race car and then they put leather in it and a muffler on it, but it’s still not very comfortable,” said Butch Leitzinger, a race car driver hired by Bugatti to kind of shepherd the Veyron and show reporters how it behaves. “This car was developed from the start as a passenger car. It’s easy to make a car go fast, but this one is docile. You don’t need special skills to drive it.” He’s right. Slip into the leather seat and notice, right off, that it’s comfortable. To save weight, there are no power seat motors (there’s a simple manual adjuster on the lower part of the seat front), and, bravo!, there are no cup holders. There’s a sound system, but it pales when compared to the symphony of 16 pistons thundering away a few inches behind your head. Snick the dual-clutch-automatic transmission into drive and step on it and the car moves like any other $2.5 million, all-wheel-drive car. Floor it and watch out.

This is the only car I’ve ever driven that pinned me into the seat back so solidly and so quickly that I thought my head would keep going back over the headrest and meld with the engine. The Veyron just leaps out and you wonder if maybe you’ve made a mistake and you’re going to head right into that zinfandel vineyard on the left, but the AWD system keeps the car planted smack to the road. Not that I tried it, of course, but this car will run zero to 100 mph and back again in about seven or eight seconds. The statistics of what it will do – and here we need the classic warning, “don’t try this at home” – are instructive: over 100 mph, the side windows automatically roll up; the car gets a shade over 10 miles per gallon, and if you drive it at full speed it will run out of gas in 12 minutes. The car has 11 radiators, and the body of the Vitesse is made of carbon fiber and its front grille is titanium. The car has an onboard cellphone-driven communications system that reports back to Bugatti headquarters in Molsheim, France, and tells the factory how the car feels, out there in, say, the tundra of Montana. If the factory senses anything awry, it notifies the owner. If the car has to travel from its home in Montana to a Veyron dealer for maintenance or repairs, Bugatti sends a truck out to pick it up. You get the idea.

If 254 mph is too slow, you can always opt for the Super Sport, which has a top speed of 268 miles an hour, but is limited to 258 mph lest the custom-made Michelin tires disintegrate. A set of new tires, mounted on the wheels, runs about $70,000, according to a Car and Driver piece four years ago, and if the transmission goes belly up that will set you back $120,000 in repair costs. Not that much of this nonsense about tires and repairs should matter to the typical Veyron buyer.

The typical owner has 35 cars

John Hill, Bugatti’s director of sales and marketing for North- and South America, says that typical Veyron owner has a profile that looks like this: he’s from 24 to 75 years old; more than 90 percent of the owners are male, they each own an average of 35 cars (collections range from 10 cars to 200 cars and the guy with 200 cars has five Veyrons), and these ur-Car Guys drive their Veyrons only about 2,500 miles a year – they do, after all, have to exercise their other charges. Then again, some of them are so in love with their Veyrons that when they visit a second home in, say, Brazil or France, they’ll fly the car over so they can have it there. In North America, Bugatti sells these cars through 10 dealers in the U.S. Bugatti’s sales break down this way: the Middle East is 30 percent of its world market (would love to see one of these things going flat out across the desert, faster than T.E. Lawrence’s camel); the U.S., 25 percent; Europe, 25 to 30 percent; and the rest of the cars are being sold mainly in China, Japan, India and a few other countries. For now, Bugatti says that when the run is finished there will be 150 Grand Sports, 75 with the base engine and the other 75 will be the souped-up version we drove. Most of them are already sold.

That’s about it. There is no other car like it. If you can pay the freight, we can’t think of any downsides to the Veyron, aside from the fact that it won’t carry much luggage (you can always have a chase truck following you).

And, as the man said, it won’t embarrass you when you pull up to the opera house.